The Poet Without a Name: Gray's Elegy and the Problem of History

by Henry Weinfield

Henry Weinfield offers a new reading not only of the Elegy itself but also of its place in English literary history. His central argument is that in Gray’s Elegy the thematic constellation of poverty, anonymity, alienation, and unfulfilled potential—or what Weinfield calls the "problem of history"—is fully articulated for the first time, and that, as a result, the Elegy represents an important turning-point in the history of English poetry.

264 pages, Hardcover

First published April 26, 1991

Reviews

[Nelson]

More than just an extended close reading of the poem in question, Weinfeld's book situates Gray's Elegy at the end of the pastoral tradition. If only the prose were as lucid as any summary. To really love this book, one has to have a high tolerance for sentences like "The foregrounding of the Elegy's anagogical dimension is thus concomitant with the submergence of its socioeconomic dialectic." Ironically, the stakes become clearest in the book's final chapters, when Weinfeld explains (convincingly) Wordsworth's rather fraught attempt to dismiss Gray's poetry. Wordsworth's heroic stand-ins for the poet are outsiders (like the nameless youth of the Elegy) who are heroic precisely to the degree they are unknown, unappreciated. Wordsworth submerges class and material realities to concoct this self-congratulating idyll; Gray, by contrast, writes a poem aware of the historical reality of unfulfilled lives. It's not all romantic hands to the brow furrowed with appreciation for nature; Gray's poet gets that unfulfilled pastoral lives are, well, unfulfilled. And Gray's poet identifies himself with those unfulfilled potentialities in a way that is, perhaps, as broadly humanistic as anything in, say, Tintern Abbey. All of this makes it sound as if Weinfeld is out to exculpate the oft-denigrated Gray at Wordsworth's expense. If only it were that easy. The vast central portion of the book is a stanza by stanza explication of Gray's Elegy, that name checks all kinds of thinkers one wouldn't think had anything to do with a post-Augustan or pre-Romantic or what-you-will popular eighteenth-century elegy that isn't really an elegy. Oddly, the opening and closing chapters are more rewarding, to this reader anyway, than the close reading, which is loaded with the kind of tortured, turgid prose quoted above. The earlier chapters are valuable for their (sometimes fraught) engagement with the massive critical response to the poem over the years.